Paul

by N. T. Wright

  The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God. Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an “image” in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God’s life would come to earth and earth’s praises would rise to God. Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to do, they break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way to be human.

  That is what Paul’s gospel and ethics are, at their heart, all about. God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And, through gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further transformation in God’s world.

  This is the heart of Paul’s famous “doctrine of justification,” which is so important in Galatians, Philippians, and Romans, though remarkably inconspicuous (until we realize how it is integrated with everything else) in the other letters. Once again the problem has been the wrong framework. If we come with the question, “How do we get to heaven,” or, in Martin Luther’s terms, “How can I find a gracious God?” and if we try to squeeze an answer to those questions out of what Paul says about justification, we will probably find one. It may not be totally misleading. But we will miss what Paul’s “justification” is really all about. It isn’t about a moralistic framework in which the only question that matters is whether we humans have behaved ourselves and so amassed a store of merit (“righteousness”) and, if not, where we can find such a store, amassed by someone else on our behalf. It is about the vocational framework in which humans are called to reflect God’s image in the world and about the rescue operation whereby God has, through Jesus, set humans free to do exactly that.

  For Paul, therefore, questions of “sin” and “salvation” are vital, but they function within a worldview different from the one Western Christians have normally assumed. For Paul, as for all devout Jews, the major problem of the world was idolatry. Humans worshipped idols and therefore behaved in ways that were less than fully human, less than fully image-bearing. That was a core Jewish belief, and Paul shared it. What he did not share, as he thought through his tradition in the light of Jesus and the spirit, was the idea that the people of Israel, as they stood, constituted the answer to this problem—as though all one had to do was to become a Jew and try to keep the Torah, and all would be well not only with Israel, but with the world. Paul knew that view, and he firmly rejected it.

  Paul believed, not least because he saw it so clearly in the scriptures, that Israel too was in Adam. Israel too had its own brand of idolatry. But the point of Jesus’s rescuing death, which Jesus himself had seen as the new Passover, was that the powerful “gods” and “lords” to which humans had given away their own proper authority had been defeated. The resurrection proved it and had thereby launched a new world and a new people to reflect the true God into that new world. That is why Paul’s Gentile mission was not a different idea from the idea of “forgiveness of sins” or the “cleansing of the heart.” It was because the powerful gospel announced and effected those realities that the old barriers between Jew and Greek were abolished in the Messiah. It was because in the Messiah the promises of Psalm 2 had come true—that God would set his anointed king over the rulers of the nations, thus extending into every corner of the world the promises made to Abraham about his “inheritance”—that Paul could summon people of every kind of background to “believing obedience.” That is why Paul’s work must be regarded just as much as “social” or “political” as it is “theological” or “religious.” Every time Paul expounded “justification,” it formed part of his argument that in the Messiah there was a single family composed of believing Jews and believing Gentiles, a family that demonstrated to the world that there was a new way of being human. Paul saw himself as a working model of exactly this. “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.”7

  Paul’s particular vocation, then, was to found and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile churches on Gentile soil, and to do so while “the restrainer” was still holding back the cataclysm that was coming all too soon. And since he could not in fact be in more places than one and could not write nearly as much, even in his longest letters, as he would ideally have liked (we think again of that long, hot night in Troas and of Eutychus falling out of the window), he realized early on that it was his job not just to teach people what to think and believe, but to teach them how. How to think clearly, scripturally, prayerfully. How to have the mind renewed and transformed so that believers could work out for themselves the thousand things that he didn’t have time to tell them. How to think with “the Messiah’s mind,” especially as it was shaped around the story of the cross: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus.”8 This is the only way in which the church would be either united or holy, and since both were mandatory—but very difficult—it was vital, Paul recognized, that those “in the Messiah” should acquire the discipline of the Christian mind. In that quest, he drew on all the resources he could find, including ideas and phrases from contemporary philosophy. “We take every thought prisoner,” he writes, “and make it obey the Messiah.”9 This, I submit, is part of the reason for the remarkable success of his work.

  All this might seem to imply, however, that Paul was primarily, and perhaps only, a “thinker”—a detached brain box, a computer on legs. Not so. As we have seen repeatedly, he defined himself in terms of love: the love of God in the Messiah, the debt of that love which only love could repay, the love that bound him in a rich personal relationship with Jesus himself (“knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings”10). The love that constantly overflowed into what we might call “pastoral” activity but that, for Paul, was simply love in action. We see that powerful but also vulnerable love in his very explicit anxieties over the Thessalonian church in the early days after its founding and in his deeply troubled reaction to the Corinthian church as he made his final journey from Ephesus to confront them once more. We see that love, powerfully and shrewdly in action, in the little letter to Philemon.

  It is out of that love and pastoral concern that there flowed simultaneously the constant question of whether he was “running to no good effect” and the constant scriptural answer: You are my servant. Isaiah 49 played around and around in his head—along with many other passages, of course, but this one, and some phrases from it in particular, formed a lifelong mental habit. Isaiah’s vision of the servant who would bring God’s light to the Gentiles and of the troubles that this servant would have to undergo—including doubt about whether his work was actually doing any good at all—was Paul’s constant companion. This was one of the things that made him tick.

  It is from within the servant vocation that we can best understand Paul’s central concept of pistis, which as we have seen means both “faith” (in the various meanings of that English word, all of which come into play at various points) and “loyalty” or “trustworthiness.” This helps us to address one of the central questions asked in our own day, as in many earlier days, about Paul: Was he, did he think of himself as, a loyal Jew?

  If pistis can mean “loyalty” as well as “faith,” might one express Paul’s most famous doctrine as “justification by loyalty”? That might be too much of a stretch, but for Paul “justifica
tion” itself meant something rather different from its normal Western meaning, framed as that has been by a moralistic vision (“Have I done all the things God wants me to do?”) linked to a platonic eschatology (“How can I go to heaven?”). For Paul, justification was about God’s declaration that this or that person was a member of the single family promised to Abraham—which meant that, though “ungodly” because they were Gentiles, such people had been “justified,” declared to be in the right, to be within God’s covenant family, by God’s overthrow of the enslaving powers, by his forgiveness of sins, and by the powerful cleansing work of the spirit. What was said of Phinehas and before that of Abraham would be said of them: “It will be reckoned to them as righteousness.” They will be members of the covenant. The “zeal” of Phinehas, the “zeal” of Saul of Tarsus, had been translated into a zeal for the gospel. The point was that one could then recognize members of the family by their pistis, which could be expressed as “believing in the God who raised Jesus from the dead” or confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead. Titus shared that pistis; that is why Paul and Barnabas insisted that he should not be circumcised. The Gentile believers in Antioch shared that pistis; that is why Paul confronted Peter when by his behavior he seemed to suggest otherwise. And so on.

  The “faith” in question is thus the response of the whole person to the whole gospel. In traditional Latin tags, it can be fides qua, the faith by which one believes, that is, the actual human trust, the personal response to the message of the gospel. Or it can be fides quae, the faith that one believes, that is, the specific things to which one gives assent. But “assent” is only ever one part of it. The gospel does not merely produce a mental reaction, a calculation and a conclusion. That matters but it never happens alone, and perhaps only a certain type of late medieval philosopher could imagine that it might. Mind and heart are inextricably linked. And that is why “loyalty” is also a vital part of pistis. “Believing obedience”—the obedience of faith, in more common translations—is the full-hearted, full-person response of loyalty to the message about Jesus. A contested loyalty, of course, but loyalty nonetheless.

  For the Jews of Paul’s day, this “loyalty” was expressed day by day, indeed several times a day, in the prayer we have seen Paul use in his younger days and then, in its radically new form, in his mature following of Jesus. As with several psalms, with the prophets, with the whole style of Jewish worship and liturgy, Paul had reworked these acts and words around the gospel events. And this was, and remained, central to his self-perception, his own deep inner sense of what made him who he was. He was a loyal Jew.

  Again and again in the closing chapters of Acts this is reemphasized, and we should resist any attempt to play this picture in Acts off against the letters of Paul himself. Of course, he had redefined what that loyalty would mean. It did not mean that, when eating with Gentile friends, he would avoid their type of food. It did not mean that he would keep the Sabbaths and the festivals the way he had kept them as a young man. When the reality has come, the signposts are no longer needed, not because they were misleading, but because they have done their work. One does not put up a sign saying, “This way to London” outside Buckingham Palace. Paul took the stance he now did neither because he was some kind of a “liberal”—whatever that might have meant in his day!—nor because he was making pragmatic compromises to try to lure Gentiles into his communities, nor, to say it again, because he secretly hated his own culture and identity. It was all because of the Messiah: “I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me.”11 If the Messiah has come, and if God has marked him out in his resurrection, then to be a loyal Jew is to be loyal to this Messiah and to the God who has acted in and through him.

  But if the Messiah had been crucified and raised, then the question of what being a loyal Jew actually meant had itself been radically redrawn. It now meant following this pattern of crucifixion and resurrection—reflecting, Paul would have insisted, the pattern of Israel’s scriptures themselves. It meant discovering the deep truth of baptism: that one was now “in the Messiah,” a member of his extended and multinational family, and that what was true of the Messiah (crucifixion and resurrection) was true of oneself. This is where the act of “calculation” belongs, carrying with it later dogmatic overtones of “imputation.” Calculate yourselves as being dead to sin, he says to those in the churches, and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus.12 What is true of him, Paul would have said, is now true of them, and they must live accordingly. They have already been raised “in him”; they will one day be raised bodily by his spirit; therefore, their entire life must be lived in this light. This takes faith, in all its usual senses, and when that faith is present, it is in fact indistinguishable from loyalty, loyalty to the Messiah, loyalty to the One God through him. This, ultimately, is what Paul learned on the road to Damascus and in his lifelong reflection on that shattering and blinding event.

  * * *

  All this points to the answer I believe Paul would have given and to the answers we ourselves might want to give to our “extra” question: Why did it work? Why was his labor ultimately so fruitful?

  There are two quite different ways of approaching this question, and I think Paul would have wanted to have both in play. He would have known all about different levels of explanation. He undoubtedly knew what 2 Kings had said about the angel of the Lord destroying the Assyrians who were besieging Jerusalem, and he may also have known the version in Herodotus, in which mice nibbled the besiegers’ bowstrings, forcing them to withdraw.13 He would certainly have known that one could tell quite different stories about the same event, all equally true in their own way. Luke’s account of Paul’s appearance before Agrippa and Bernice would be significantly different from what Paul himself might have told his jailer that night, and different too from what Agrippa and Bernice might have said to one another when talking it over the next day.

  So what might be said, from different angles, about the reasons for the surprising long-term success of Paul’s work? To go a step farther, helping us to get a sense of the significance of the apostle’s work, let’s ask: How might Paul himself assess this success if he could have seen it?

  Paul would probably begin with a theological answer. There is One God, and this God has overcome the powers of darkness through his son; we should expect that by his spirit he will cause the light of the knowledge of his glory to spread throughout the world—through the faithful, suffering, and prayerful witness of Jesus’s followers. Or, to put it another way, the One God has already built his new Temple, his new microcosmos; the Jew-plus-Gentile church is the place where the divine spirit already lives in our midst, already reveals his glory as a sign of what will happen one day throughout the whole world. So, sooner or later, this movement is bound to thrive.

  Of course, Paul would not expect all this to happen smoothly or easily. Paul is after all a realist. He would never assume that the transformation of small and often muddled communities into a much larger body, forming a majority in the Roman world, would come about without terrible suffering and horrible pitfalls. Yes, he would be saddened, but not surprised, at the mistakes that would be made in the coming centuries and the battles that would have to be fought. But he will insist that what matters is Jesus and the spirit. Something has happened in Jesus, he would insist, something of cosmic significance. This movement doesn’t just run on its own steam. It isn’t just the accidental by-product of energetic work and historical opportunity. God is at work in the midst of his people to produce the will and the energy. This is bound to have its larger effect, sooner or later and by whatever means.

  But would Paul think this theological explanation sufficient? In one sense yes and in another sense no. Paul was very much alive to all the factors the historian, as opposed to the theologian, might want to study. He would have been aware of the way Herodotus demythologized the story in 2 Kings. P
aul knew that others in his own day were doing the same kind of thing with the stories in Homer.

  But just because he would not wish to copy Herodotus and give a purely naturalistic explanation, he certainly wouldn’t want instead to ascribe the whole thing to divine or angelic power operating without human agency. Paul believed that when grace was at work, the human agents themselves were regularly called upon to work hard as a result, not least in prayer. He says this of himself.14 The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

  So what was it about Paul and his work that might, humanly speaking, have made the difference? In particular, what was it about Paul the man that made him—let’s face it—one of the most successful public intellectuals of all time? What did he have that enabled him to take advantage of the circumstances (a common language, freedom of travel, Roman citizenship) and establish his unlikely movement not only for the course of his own lifetime but thereafter?

  The first thing, coming at us throughout his story, is his sheer energy. We feel it pulsing through the letters. We watch as he responds to violence in one city by going straight on to the next one and saying and doing the same things. He is the kind of person to whom people say, “Don’t you ever sleep?” He is working all hours, his hands hardened with his tentmaking, his back stiff from bending at the workbench. But he is ready every moment for the visitor with a question, for the distraught youngster whose parents have thrown him out, for the local official worried about his status if people discover he is following Jesus. He is ready to put down his tools for an hour or two and go from house to house to encourage, to warn, to pray, to weep. He is persistent. People know they won’t get rid of him, won’t be able to fob him off with glib excuses. He is all the while thinking through what he will say in his afternoon lecture in the house of Titius Justus in Corinth or the hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus. He takes time out to call a scribe and dictate a letter. He is relentless. He pauses to say the evening prayers with his close friends. He works on into the night, praying under his breath for the people he has met, for the city officials, for the Jesus-followers in other cities, for the next day’s work, for the next phase of the project.